Red Hat Delivers OpenShift Online PaaS, Expands Ecosystem

Red Hat has announced the availability of OpenShift Online, its public platform-as-a-service (PaaS) cloud offering, beginning June 11. The company also announced an expansion of its ecosystem for OpenShift.
Since its debut in developer preview in 2011, more than 1 million applications have been created on OpenShift Online. This new offering gives Red Hat a full family of open PaaS solutions: OpenShift Origin, the open source PaaS project; OpenShift Online, a commercial public PaaS offering; and OpenShift Enterprise, an on-premise private PaaS product. Red Hat announced OpenShift Online in conjunction with its Red Hat Summit, which runs June 11-14 in Boston.
OpenShift Online enables developers to quickly build, launch and host applications in the public cloud. The elastic, multi-language, PaaS architecture of OpenShift Online automates the provisioning, management and scaling of applications so developers can focus on writing the code. As a polyglot PaaS, OpenShift's support for multiple languages, including Java, Ruby, PHP, Python, Node.js, and Perl, allows for a low barrier to entry, Red Hat said.
"As PaaS matures, enterprise developers want world-class support so they can focus less on system administration and more on coding," said Ashesh Badani, general manager of cloud and OpenShift at Red Hat, in a statement. "Our new OpenShift Online brings enterprise-grade services to public PaaS and gives Red Hat the industry's most complete PaaS portfolio."

OpenShift Online is based on the OpenShift Origin open-source project and leverages Red Hat Enterprise Linux and the SELinux subsystem for a secure, multi-tenant architecture. Users and ISV partners can also take advantage of third-party extensions or build their own through OpenShift's extensible, pluggable cartridge framework.

"We have been running our business on OpenShift Online for approximately one year and have been quite pleased with the experience and Red Hat's support," said Ruben Daniels, CEO and founder of Cloud9 IDE, in a statement. "OpenShift has worked extremely well as our back-end application infrastructure, and it has enabled us to scale up to support hundreds of thousands of end users. As a startup, OpenShift has been an ideal platform because it has allowed us to focus on our application and our customers, and not on infrastructure and operations."
For a monthly fee, developers subscribing to OpenShift Online's commercial offering, known as the Silver tier, will have access to technical support and additional platform resources from Red Hat. Developers using OpenShift Online can purchase the Silver level service tier with a credit card, paying on a month-by-month basis for access and capacity. This service tier also offers Red Hat technical support.
The Silver service tier for OpenShift Online by Red Hat will be available in North America beginning June 11 and in Europe the following week, with pricing starting as low as $20 per month.
Meanwhile, also at its Red Hat Summit, Red Hat announced the expansion of its OpenShift ecosystem by enabling partners to more easily integrate with the Red Hat platform. It announced a new cartridge specification for OpenShift that will enable tighter integration with the complementary partner technologies and products through Red Hat's OpenShift Partner Program. With the new cartridge specification, OpenShift developers can experience improved ease of use and reduced time to add partner offerings, enabling them to design and code applications without losing time on technology integration.